Augusto De Luca: Spaces & Sculptures

Augusto De Luca graduated in law, then became a professional photographer in the mid-1970s, working in the threshold between traditional and experimental photography. His style is a culmination of his experience with multiple photography genres; making use of many materials, and striving to enhance primary elements in his shots. His expression is minimalist, combining shapes and signs in a way that is reminiscent of metaphysical atmospheres. While his photographs have been exhibited by many galleries, De Luca is also active in the commercial space, as the author of record covers, advertising campaign pictures and photography books. He has also taught photography at the “Montecitorio Club” of the Italian Parliament.

Light enhances but its shadow deletes, thus giving the picture its depth, its third dimension and its subtractive properties… I believe that commitment and technical skill can be achieved by means of one’s own will and study, while fantasy and passion are more valuable because they are innate and inescapably peculiar assets.

All my photographs seep through EMOTION, through the relationship I establish with the place I am portraying. Whenever I see something that captivates me, I start turning around it to find MY OWN frame. I work on myself and on the city at the same time.

I need geometry to set the grammar of the image expressive language. The structural skeleton, the composition and the geometric layout provide a perspective from which one can read the image; otherwise we would do what Dadaists did when they put words in a little bag and then took them out at random in order to compose a poem.

An incipient Mother Man has always inhabited my deeper self; creativity has always been my companion … I have tried to express myself in a very definite style but by means of all kinds of materials and formats. I wish to discover how my own creativity unfolds under different circumstances …

I feel like a sailor, or better, like an explorer of the immense universe of art. The artist is a discoverer in search of the keys that open the door to emotions and feelings. Art is the place where rationality, fantasy, truth and fiction mix up in a detonating mixture.

Great photography comes about at the right time but it also needs the right cut that enhances that precise moment … Photography must feed on both contents and form, if it gives up the one for the other it is not going to last.

I possess multiple souls, that come out month in month out, year in year out. I am a photographer, a performer, a lawyer, a collector, a musician. I am all that, I do not throw anything away, I just allow my diverse souls to take turns…If you take pictures for the sake of other people, your true essence will never come out, you will end up with doing things others already did, just because you know that people like them ….

My photographs convey my ideas, passions, monsters, who I am and what is on my mind.